Thomas Henshaw (alchemist)

[2] After attending school at Barnet and then at Cripplegate, London, under Thomas Farnaby,[3] he was entered as commoner at University College, Oxford, in 1634, and remained there five years without taking a degree.

[4] At the suggestion of Obadiah Walker and Abraham Woodhead, he studied mathematics, a student of William Oughtred at Albury, Surrey for nine months from 1636, finding it more stimulating than the teaching of his tutor John Elmherst.

[4] He took part in a campaign under William II, Prince of Orange;[11] and then entered the French army, in which he became major,[4] and at some point served under Sir Robert Moray.

[18] During his time in Paris, Henshaw purchased and annotated a copy of La Vie Devote, currently owned by the University of Kentucky Libraries.

[20] A "chemical club" in which he was involved was set up in 1650 by Robert Child: other members were Thomas Vaughan and William Webbe.

[21] In alchemy he collaborated with Vaughan, who resided with him in Kensington, and Samuel Hartlib reported Henshaw's claims to have found the alkahest, with a formula of provenance from Jan Baptist van Helmont, via Hugh Plat.

[3] Hartlib noted Henshaw's plans for a college, one of a number of proposals of the time entertained also by Evelyn and his friend Abraham Cowley.

[17] Henshaw was occupying the Pondhouse or Moathouse, in the manor of West Town, Kensington, a property that had been leased by his father.

[32] In 1688 he borrowed a work by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont from Francis Lodwick, another of the "Hooke circle" that functioned also as a book club.

After the Restoration minor papers appeared by him in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,[34] and two short treatises on making Salt Peter and Gunpowder.

[4] In 1654 there was printed at Spa a Vindication of Thomas Henshaw, sometime Major in the French King's service, in justification of himself against the Aspersions throwne upon him.